Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) was an American artist. He has been the subject of retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Serpentine Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the Foundation Beyeler, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and the Barbican, among other venues, and his work is in the permanent collections of major museums around the world. Larry Warsh is the editor of Basquiat's Notebooks and two books by Ai Weiwei, Humanity and Weiwei-isms (all Princeton). Warsh was an early collector of Basquiat and a member of the Basquiat Authentication Committee.
As an artist, the most precious thing is what's in the mind. Basquiat's sentences in this book are so delicate and not wasted. They show his inner world truthfully and precisely, why he was a unique person and a unique artist. I love this book. ---Ai Weiwei [Warsh] makes the contents sound good, too: 'this book provides a glimpse into Basquiat's incredible mind . . . . May his words and thoughts enliven your thinking today as much as they have inspired me for many decades.' * Times Literary Supplement *